What do you do if your ratings are bad? You take it, that’s what.
[]
Year: 2010
Thursday’s “Chicks and Dicks” news
Film
- Channel 4 to increase Film4’s budget 50%
- Tom Hardy to appear in next Batman film
British TV
- BBC cuts 22 drama department jobs [subscription required]
- Whites‘ audience plummeting
- MPs to debate future of S4C
- Watch picks up third season of Sanctuary
US TV
- Fox picks up Chicks and Dicks
- No Ordinary Family and Running Wilde slip in the ratings
- ABC wants Romeo and Juliet series
- Lost exec producers working on fairy-tale series
- Bruce Boxleitner to guest on NCIS
- CBS developing series based on Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly books, Samuel L Jackson working on Hawkshaw for The CW about man who thinks he’s descended from Sherlock Holmes, and Craig Ferguson working on single-mom comedy Roz for CBS
US TV
Question of the week: what do you think of product placement?
Product placement is all the rage – well, it is in the US, but it’ll be true of the UK soon. Yes, UK viewers, soon you’ll be able to see all your favourite products displayed prominently in TV programmes in an entirely natural and seamless manner.
There are benefits to advertisers. Unlike commercials, you can’t forward wind through product placement. When the programme gets sold on DVDs, overseas and online, there it still is. Even if someone downloads it illegally and doesn’t watch it on TV, that product placement still gets viewed. That’s why advertisers have to spend so much to place their products in a programme. All that lovely product placement money, in fact, can be enough to spell the difference between survival and cancellation (at least on NBC, where Heroes and Chuck survived purely because of product placement money).
Now some people might find this irritating. They might feel this corrupts the purity of TV’s “artitude”. Others will just find it incredibly distracting, since it’s rarely integrated as well as might be hoped.
So this week’s question is:
What do you think of product placement? Is it a necessary and even acceptable evil? Or is it distracting and irritating?
As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog
Back to the Future: Eric Stolz and Michael J Fox
You may or may not know this but Michael J Fox wasn’t the original Marty McFly in Back to the Future. That honour belongs to Eric Stolz, whom you may know from The Fly 2, The Prophecy or even Caprica (his CVs bigger than that, though). There’s not much footage of Stoltz that still survives, but newly emerged for the 25th anniversary edition is this footage, which may ring a few bells:
But for Michael J Fox lovers, how about this little bit of joy – Fox recreating this year the original trailer for the movie?
Wednesday’s “ghost story for Christmas” news
Doctor Who
- Doctor to become immortal? – 12 regenerations no longer the limit
Film
- Adam Brody and Greta Gerwig to star in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress
- Luke Evans, Alice Eve join John Cusack in The Raven
- Paramount acquires Out of Range
Radio
- UK Theme axed by accident
British TV
- Downton Abbey gets a second series
- BBC drama chief Ben Stephenson questions Sky’s commitment to homegrown drama, proves even more ignorant of US TV production than before
- Aardman profits halve
- John Hurt to star in remake of Whistle and I’ll Come To You for BBC2 at Christmas
- Channel 4 and BBC bosses write letter to the government about News International’s takeover of Sky
US TV
- Trailer for Justified season two
- Robert de Niro and Richard price teaming for new police drama
- Monday night ratings down
- DVR ratings for first week of Fall season in
- 10 Things I Hate About You‘s Lindsey Shaw to join Pretty Little Liars
- Nikita to be made ‘lighter‘
- Richard Chamberlain joins Brothers and Sisters
- Terra Nova pilot could cost $20m